FontFriend 3.1 Loves Google Webfonts

I’ve had a num­ber of requests to bet­ter inte­grate Google Web­fonts into Font­Friend. They keep adding all these great fonts that any­one can use for free, and should be part of a tool like Font­Friend. The trou­ble was that they didn’t have an API, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult. More on that later, because I got it working:

Just pick a font from the drop­down list

Invoke the book­marklet as usual (it’s always up to date), and you’ll see a fancy new Google Web­fonts drop­down. Pick a font and it’ll appear in the cus­tom Font Fam­i­lies list. All vari­ants (all weights, both roman & italic) are auto­mat­i­cally pulled in.

How was I able to do this with­out an API? YQL to the res­cue, which it turns out is awe­some for tasks like this. But, after post­ing a teaser on Dribb­ble, Pablo Impal­lari hooked me up with the Google Web­fonts teams, who will have an API for this in place soon. I debated wait­ing to release until then, but I’d already done the work, so why not let every­one play already?

One other lit­tle nugget: Font­Friend will detect already-embedded Google Web­fonts on your page and throw them into the cus­tom fonts list auto­mat­i­cally. See a demo of Google Web­font detec­tion.

Finally, after tweet­ing about it, I’ve had rep­re­sen­ta­tives from a few web­font ser­vices reach out to me about bet­ter inte­gra­tion once they get their APIs in place. There should be more ways to play in the future!